Whenever Clara and I need some mid-afternoon motivation when we’re in the home office, we put on Kenshi Yonezu’s 2017 masterpiece Bootleg . I realised I’ve never shared any of it, so I reckon it warrants a Music Monday : What genre does Kenshi Yonezu perform? Yes! As an aside, this was among the first albums we bought when we went to Japan the second time , and realised that HMV and Tower Records were still a thing. That was almost ten years ago , wow. Hey Ruben, why buy a tin...

When a compiler optimizes your program, it has to guess. Which functions are worth inlining? Which side of a branch is the common one? Which method does this interface call actually reach? At compile time it cannot know, so it uses heuristics. Profile-guided optimization (PGO) replaces the guessing with measurement: you run your program, record where it spends its time, and hand that recording back to the compiler for a second build. PGO is a common feature of compiler systems. Google applied ...

I just went through the queue of submissions to blogroll.org and probably deleted 95% of what was in there. This is not unusual, and has become more and more common lately. A big reason for this is clearly AI. The amount of slop submissions I’m getting is trending upwards, unfortunately. The other big reason is people attempting to use the blogroll as a way to get traffic for their shitty marketing sites, which is obviously annoying and a waste of my time. There’s people who have submitted...

Wife: I need help clipping the goat's hooves. Here, hold this... Me: ... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Wife: I need help clipping the goat's hooves. Here, hold this... Me: ... Thanks for readin...

Anubis v1.27.0 (Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn) is now available via Docker and direct download from GitHub releases. This release adds Windows Server support, automatically renames cookies based on settings to avoid infinite challenge loops, adds two new localizations, and more. Breaking change: cookie names are dynamically created based on cookie settings Anubis tries to avoid breaking changes as much as possible, but sometimes we have to make them for the sake of the users. This ...

NB: This isn’t about crypto. I don’t care about crypto. Chris messaged me the other week asking if I wanted to implement zero-knowledge proofs. I initially was not interested, but then he said: What if I told you there’s a version of them that has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies? What if I told you it involves graph theory? What if I told you there’s a 30 line implementation? Now that was interesting. The idea of a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is that there are two...

Introduction In the Livelymerge project, Dan Ingalls, Peter Van Hardenberg, and I (Alex Warth) are exploring the opportunities and challenges that arise from using an Automerge document as the heap of a program. A couple of opportunities: Persistence: The program’s heap is persistent, similar to a Smalltalk image. If you close the program today and open it two weeks from now, every object will be exactly as you left it. Collaboration: In a multi-user context, all of the par...

Every piece of disruptive technology in history has a life story. For X-BAT, that story begins nearly forty years before its conception with the development of a unique propulsion technology. AVEN ® , or the Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle, is the thrust-vectoring engine nozzle that lets Shield AI’s X-BAT launch and land vertically without a runway. It wasn’t initially designed to enable the world’s first AI-piloted vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) strike fighter. It was create...

Shipping successful products requires rigorous engineering and sustained effort. Yet immediate pressure for the next project cycle often overshadows post-launch team recognition. While competitive salaries recruit talent, functional and well-crafted rewards sustain daily morale. Modern technical and creative teams prefer functional utility, solid materials, and clear craftsmanship over disposable corporate giveaways. The following list outlines nine customizable gift ideas focused on ...

I'm so grateful for my time at OpenAI, where I led alignment safety for the official ChatGPT basketball . I gained so much valuable experience building Altman's armageddon engines, and I'm taking it to the next level with my new startup: Jurassic Park. At Jurassic Park, we're resurrecting the ultimate apex predators to defend humanity against misaligned AI. Cyberdefense Capabilities Further reading: OpenAI incident report , Anthropic incident report . According to the fossil...

When I look at a painting, or read a poem, or a story, I feel like I am entering a new world, one created by the artist, the writer, to evoke a particular feeling, to highlight something meaningful, to document a moment, and for many other reasons too. I love the feeling of building a world in my mind when I engage with a work of art: the scenery in a novel or a poem, for example, or of the images in a painting that come together to help me understand a moment in time. I love when one work opens...

House over the Bridge by Diego Rivera, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at the Endangered Species Act and housing production, why it’s hard for LEGO to use 3D printing, robotic welding and shipbuilding, modular data centers, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing A paper by Max Tabarrok finds th...

OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about "the Hugging Face Incident" ( previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It's short and information dense and well worth watching, in particular because it provides full details of what happened and how things played out inside OpenAI. I've used the video to construct the timeline below. Here's the timeline. My favourite detail is at the end: OpenAI found out that they were responsibl...

There’s a game called Mass Effect , which I haven’t played, but I’m told in the game there’s this species of sentient robots, the Geth , whose creators try to exterminate them, and the trigger for this Butlerian jihad was a domestic servant Geth looking up at its owner and asking: “does this unit have a soul?”. And if you’re playing the game in 2007 you probably think: yeah, a machine asking this question is proof that it has personhood or sapience or sophonce , whatever you cal...

0.0 Context Setting Thursday, 6 August 2026 in Portland, Oregon. It’s been 2 days and 29 years since Skynet was turned on, and we only have about three weeks or so until it gains sentience and all goes kaplooey. 0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! I’m afraid I’ve had to postpone How People Work, Live! ... with Dylan Wilbanks this week. We’ll schedule it for another time. That means the next ones coming up are: 006 How People Work, Live! ... with weaver ( register here! ), on Frid...

Last year I spoke at MK Geek Night about my personal reflections on how, after years of chasing IndieWeb perfection, I just accepted my imperfect website. I finally sat down to transcribe it and post it here. The base of this post was a transcript of my presentation but some editing is now present for added clarity, blog context instead of presentation and correction of grammatical mistakes. This a ramble about what a safe personal online space focused on creativity, community, and self-ex...

Everyone knows that AI sycophancy is when the model tells you how smart you are. Wow, you’re absolutely right. That’s not just a new idea — it’s genuinely groundbreaking. You’re a very special user. Easy to spot, isn’t it? The discussion around AI sycophancy peaked last year, when the “#keep4o” movement was protesting the removal of OpenAI’s most sycophantic model (GPT-4o), and many people were openly slipping into AI psychosis. I don’t know if frontier AI model...

Before we begin, I’m thrilled to share that Open Lunar Foundation  is continuing as a sponsor of my  Moon Monday  blog+newsletter for the sixth year!  🌕 Open Lunar is a US-based non-profit organization with a global team that develops bottom-up tools of lunar governance to enable and promote cooperative, peaceful, and sustainable exploration of our Moon by all countries. Disclaimer for transparency:  I aid Open Lunar’s work with technical communications , and have newly joined ...

(Some of this came from a Reddit post  I read, and some of  the comments on it.)  Here are theorems with names that I think are funny or unusual. The names are also pointers to the Wikipedia entry on them or some other source. The Chicken McNugget Theorem The Ham Sandwich Theorem The Hairy Ball Theorem Freshman Dream The law of the unconscious statistician The Homicidal Chauffeur Problem The Pigeonhole Principle  (We are so used to this we no longer find it funny, but it is.)  Eventown and ...

6 months later, where does MCP stand today? 6 months later, where does MCP stand today?

Shortly after Apple launched the budget MacBook Neo , Dell announced their response, a new low-end XPS 13 . Matching the Neo's current pricing, it starts at $699, or $599 with an educational discount. That discount is currently set to expire on November 2, and with the current component pricing insanity, I'd be surprised if we don't see a price increase on both laptops by next year. I ran the XPS 13 through my gauntlet of benchmarks , and published a review on my YouTube channel: ...

Hello, We have another dose of human generated facts for you. I was planning to write about these biter and enemy behavior changes before the 2.1 release, but an unfortunately timed neck injury led to it being postponed. The silver lining here is that now I can write about all the player reactions and funny bugs we've found along the way. We might be getting into controversial territory here, but I like the biters and I like fighting them. I like clearing nests when expa...

How and Why Netflix Built a Real-Time Distributed Graph: Part 3 — Querying the graph with gRPC execution API Authors: Nilesh Mishra and Ajit Koti This is the third entry of a multi-part blog series describing how we built a Real-Time Distributed Graph (RDG). In Part 1 , we discussed the motivation for creating the RDG and the architecture of the data processing pipeline that populates it. In Part 2 , we discussed how we designed the storage layer to handle billions of nodes and edges...